On March 1, FastForward 1812 will welcome its first lab tenants. The 15,000-square-foot space boasts BSL2 wet labs; cell culture microscopy and cold storage rooms; shared scientific instruments and more.

Innovative solutions to wound care, technologies to relieve a strained health care system, a pill that could reverse type 2 diabetes. The path to developing and bringing these and other discoveries and innovations to market runs through the FastForward 1812 innovation hub.

Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures opened the 23,000-square-foot flagship space shortly after New Year’s Day. The first tenants began occupying office and co-working spaces the third week of January, and lab tenants will move in March 1. Startups have leased much of the available space already, and what remains has been strategically left empty to accommodate growth among the 18 startup tenants and the arrival of new startups.

INNOVA-CON 4.0 is bringing its members another great opportunity to meet in person and connect with luminaries in the innovation profession. The meeting, at Booz Allen Hamilton's awesome Innovation center in Washington D.C. is this years location. Content will focus on how to use strategies and methods of innovation to create value. In addition, for the first time this year, we will be live-streaming the event for those who do not have a budget to get to Washington.

The titans of the tech industry are known for their confidence that they can solve any problem--even, as it turns out, the one that's defeated every other attempt so far. That's why the most far-out strategies to cheat death are being tested in America's playground for the young, deep-pocketed and brilliant: Silicon Valley.

SSTI submitted a letter to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in response to a request for information on the Institute’s investments in early translational research. The letter recommends partnerships and initiatives NHLBI could develop to improve identification of commercializable discoveries, strengthen business and technical development, and facilitate the scaling of innovations and spin-outs. These suggestions are grounded in examples of work by SSTI members. Read the full letter on ssti.org.

The Maryland Department of Commerce; the University of Maryland, Baltimore; Hood College; Washington College; and Stevenson University have endowed a total of $8.3 million in four new research professorships. The endowments were made through the Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative (MEI), a state program created to spur basic and applied research in scientific and technical fields at the colleges and universities. The schools raised $4.3 million in private funding for each chair and Maryland Commerce approved matching grants of $4 million to support the endowments.

“The groundbreaking research coming out of these colleges and universities is addressing key issues impacting our communities today, from cancer research to sustainable food systems and biofuels,” said Maryland Commerce Secretary Mike Gill. “We are proud to partner with these world-class institutions to keep our state on the cutting edge of technology and discovery.”

Some big ideas seem to appear out of nowhere, but in 2008 Chuan He deliberately went looking for one. The US National Institutes of Health had just launched grants to support high-risk, high-impact projects, and He, a chemist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, wanted to apply. But he needed a good pitch.

He had been studying a family of proteins that repair damaged DNA, and he began to suspect that these enzymes might also act on RNA. By a stroke of luck, he ran into molecular biologist Tao Pan, who had been investigating specific chemical marks, called methyl groups, that are present on RNAs. The pair worked in the same building at the University of Chicago, and began meeting regularly. From those conversations, their big idea took shape.

Just Confirmed: Maryland Governor Larry Hogan to Present Keynote April 19th

This invitation-only event is free for executive level biotech leaders and is presented by BioHealth Innovation, VirginiaBio, Paragon Bioservices, Inova, University System of Maryland and MedImmune/AstraZeneca. Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC set the bar high for biotech innovation. So please join us for our Annual BioHealth Capital Region Forum that will highlight the accomplishments of today and chart our successes of tomorrow.

We are excited to bring you an exceptional line up of speakers. The program will feature sessions that focus on Advancing Science and Accelerating Innovation.

Symbiomix today announced it has hired David L. Stern, MBA, a seasoned biopharmaceutical executive with over 20 years of experience leading the commercialization of treatments in women’s health and fertility, as Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Mr. Stern joins Symbiomix on the heels of the company’s recent submission of a New Drug Application (NDA) with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its drug candidate Solosec™, an innovative antibiotic designed to treat BV. The company hired Taunia Markvicka, PharmD, MBA, as Chief Commercial Officer in 2016 and has been rapidly preparing for the commercialization of Solosec™.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017 3pm to 5pm Salisbury University - Academic Commons

How do you know if you've created something unique? What's the best way to protect your ideas?   These questions and more will be answered during a free Intellectual Property Workshop. Meet IP professionals and entrepreneurs. Learn the  latest intellectual property and innovation protection strategies as well as tips on everything from trademarks and copyrights to patents and trade secrets.

Get a sneak peek of the country's largest, most advanced mobile STEM lab. Please join us for an Open House onboard MdBio's new mobile laboratory, the Mobile eXploration Lab.

Tuesday, March 7, 2017 |  4 - 6 PM  

Johns Hopkins University Montgomery Parking Lot

9601 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850

Corner of Key West Avenue & Broschart Road. Ample free parking available.

If you’re learning how to develop CRADAs or have ever wished for an easy guide, take our newest free e-course! “The CRADA Developer’s Guide” is now available to take at your own pace in our Learning Center!

The CRADA is one of federal tech transfer’s most powerful tools. This course helps you understand the process and considerations for developing and managing a good CRADA, including:

When to choose a CRADA How to craft a CRADA Managing a CRADA Troubleshooting strategies.

The Baltimore Ravens Innovation Challenge at Light City is a live pitch competition where six startup companies will present in front of a panel of judges to win a year-long marketing package with a value of $200,000 from the Baltimore Ravens.

The Competition will take place during the SocialLab@LightCity - April 6, 2017. Labs@LightCity will bring together national and local thought leaders and engaged, inspired citizens from diverse backgrounds to explore cutting edge concepts for sparking social change.

A discounted ticket for friends of Light City is now available for $99 (a discount of $50). Use the code LCFriends50 when checking out and your discount will be automatically applied to your registration. You may also share the code with friends who you believe would want to join the conversation, vote during the Pitch Competition, learn and have a real impact on the Labs, Baltimore, and beyond!

Immunomic Therapeutics’ is pleased to announce five finalists for the Cancer Discovery Incubator Award.

Immunomic’s unique incubator award offers the selected innovator an opportunity to develop a proof-of-concept experiment in their laboratories. Additionally, the winner will be gifted funding, lab equipment and a unique mentorship with the Immunomic executive team for one year. The goal is to empower the innovator to conduct proof-of-concept experiments and ultimately, help the winner attract funding, partnerships, and fuel growth.

Niche-specific content is usually not readily available through regular generic search engines. One example is the academic and scholarly content. While running a  search query about an academic topic through a generic search engine such as  Google would probably render fairly decent results, it, however, usually takes digging into so much fluff before finally landing on relevant results. This is where having access to topic-specific search engines comes in handy. Such search engines do not only provide specific content tailored to the topic under study but their content is more likely to be reliable and authoritative. To this end, we have compiled this list of excellent academic search engines that teachers, student researchers and academics can use to quickly locate and access scholarly works and publications. We have only included what we believe are the most relevant and popular titles out there. If you have other suggestions to add to the list please share with us on our Facebook page.

MagBio Genomics, Inc. announces the launch of its new Blood STASIS™ 21- ccfDNA tube for venous whole blood collection and room temperature stabilization of circulating cell-free DNA (ccfDNA).

The Blood STASIS 21-ccfDNA is a direct draw whole blood collection system that contains a proprietary reagent that prevents post-collection release of genomic DNA from white blood cells, resulting in efficient and accurate recovery of ccfDNA with minimal genomic DNA (gDNA) contamination leading to more informative and quality data.

Join Sinai Hospital BioIncubator on Thursday, February 23, 2017, for the second seminar of our Distinguished Speaker Series, sponsored by TEDCO. Keynote speaker Jeff Gibbs, a member of our Innovation Council, will be speaking about the FDA and regulatory affairs.

Event information: When: Thursday, February 23, 2017 from 4:00-5:30pm Location: 2401 W. Belvedere Ave., Baltimore, MD 21215 Room: Phyllis and Leonard J. Attman Board Room (Sinai Hospital Board Room) Parking: Please park in the general hospital parking visitor's lot, located outside the main entrance of the hospital. This will give you the easiest access to the Phyllis and Leonard J. Attman Board Room.

About The Speaker

Mr. Gibbs is a Director at Hyman, Phelps & McNamara, P.C., Washington, DC, the largest law firm specializing in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues. Prior to entering private practice, he served as Associate Chief Counsel for Enforcement at FDA. Mr. Gibbs is currently the chairman of the Food and Drug Law Institute, and he previously served as a member of the George Mason University Human Subjects Review Board. He has written and spoken extensively on FDA issues. Mr. Gibbs graduated from Princeton University and New York University School of Law.

March 14-15, 2017, Washington, DC 

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), in collaboration with the Chamber of Digital Commerce announces a health standards and data innovation Code-a-Thon.  Code-a-Thon contestants will use open source distributed ledger technology and health-specific standards to address one of the following health IT Tracks:

The Washington DC/Baltimore Chapter of Women In Bio is presenting a program to learn about how bioscience discoveries move from the bench to the market. The route from discovery to market is not linear. Our panelists will relay their experiences with clinical trials, manufacturing, and marketing and will discuss how each of these aspects interacts along the way. Whether you are looking to enter the world of bench to market or are just curious about the process, this will be an informative and fun event. Moderated by Lynn Johnson Langer, Program Director, Sr. Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University, our panel includes the following individuals:

• Neta Nelson - Associate Director, Clinical Operations & Project Management, Technical Resources International, Inc.
• Maura Kahn - Vice President, Business Development and Marketing, Noxilizer, Inc.
• Kathy Webb - Senior Director GMP Operations, Paragon Bioservices, Inc.

Date/Time: Thursday, February 23, 2017 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. EST

Venue: Johns Hopkins University – Montgomery Campus 106-110 A&R Building 9601 Medical Center Drive Rockville, MD 20850

Thursday, Feb 23 Vigilant Bioservices Open House (UMB Biopark) Come explore our Biorepository then join us for the UMB BioPark Holiday Happy Hour! Tours are from 1:00-5:00pm

Vigilant Bioservices provides GMP storage solutions for Biotech organizations, including outsourced temperature controlled storage and risk mitigation/business continuity services.

If you demand a return on the cost of quality, we offer peace of mind knowing your biomaterials are safe.

A group of scientists and their supporters are set to march Sunday in Boston’s Copley Square in an event they’ve dubbed “a rally to stand up for science” in the Trump years.

Inside a large nearby convention center, meanwhile, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the United States’ largest general scientific society, has featured speeches and panel sessions further underscoring the sense that under President Trump, scientists could face wide-ranging political conflicts and challenges, and will have to decide how to meet them.

The products that make cities "smart" will be developed, tested and perhaps scaled in our backyard.

A partnership of the Herndon-based Center for Innovative Technology, D.C.-based Smart City Works and 22 CityLink, the master developer of the Gramercy District smart city planned for Ashburn, is accepting applications for its initial cohort of companies in Smart City Works @ Herndon.

OncoImmune, Inc. today announced that is has closed on a $15.0 million Series A round of fundraising led by 3E Bioventures Capital (“3E”).

The new capital will be used primarily to develop a novel clinical stage asset targeting the CD24-Siglec pathway that regulates host inflammatory response to tissue injuries, which has broad implications in the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases, cancer and graft-versus-host disease (GvHD). OncoImmune will continue clinical testing of its lead clinical product, CD24Fc, in a Phase II trial for the prevention of acute GvHD following myeloablative allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant. CD24Fc has received orphan drug designation for GvHD in both the US and Europe. The funding will also support development of other immuno-oncology (IO) assets with a focus on solid tumor targeting monoclonal antibodies, cancer vaccines, and immunotherapy-related adverse events.

Host:  UM BioPark & Wexford + Technology

Location:  UM BioPark Life Sciences Conference Center 801 W. Baltimore Street Baltimore  Maryland  21201

Time:  5:00pm to 6:30pm

Please join the BioPark's Monthly Networking Event along with Colleagues from UMBC. Mingle with UM Venture program managers, BioPark tenants, and UMB faculty and staff.

A record number of biotechnology, life sciences and other tech-related companies with a presence in New Jersey stand to benefit from private investments spurred in part by tax credits approved by state officials last year — a sign the Garden State continues to serve as the nation’s medicine chest.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority announced Tuesday it has approved 251 applications from “angel investors” who are eligible for state income-tax credits to help offset the more than $96 million in private funding they funneled to Garden State tech firms during 2016 — the highest annual total since the program launched three years ago.

What’s the best way to build a startup? Bootstrap it, raise little or no VC funding, and (ideally) sell it for hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars, according to two venture capitalists.

That’s what they did at least. Andrew Farquharson, now the managing director of InCube Ventures in San Jose, CA, was the chief operating officer of Almeda, CA-based Operon Technologies when it sold to European nucleic acid company Qiagen in an all-stock deal worth around $110 million in 2000. Farquharson and his co-founders tried, but failed, to raise venture funding and instead were able to bootstrap.

Gaithersburg-based NexImmune, a biotech developing immunotherapy treatments for cancer, has been acquired by a consortium of big-name biotech veterans and investors.

Welcome to the fifth edition of the U.S. Chamber International IP Index, “The Roots of Innovation.” This year’s index recognizes the indispensable role of intellectual property (IP), in facilitating innovative and creative activity on a socially transformative scale.

Each economy in the Index presents a unique IP profile. As this Index has grown from 11 economies in its first edition to 45 in the current publication, it has become exceedingly clear that just as elections matter, so do IP policy choices. These choices are not simply a matter of East versus West, developed versus less-developed, or rich versus poor. Rather, the Index represents a broad spectrum of sovereign policy choices. Those choices have important consequences for each economy’s innovative and creative success, and for the collective welfare of all the world’s citizens.

The Big Idea CONNECTpreneur Forum is a Community of over 5000 CEOs, Entrepreneurs, VCs and angels, CXOs and other business leaders in the Mid-Atlantic Region.

Each quarterly CONNECTpreneur Forum mashes up 400+ top founders, investors and business leaders for a morning breakfast event featuring awesome networking, newsmaking speakers, and a showcase of 7-8 exciting early stage companies.

This UNIQUE EVENT is like NONE OTHER in our region, due to the high quality of our attendees and participants, as well as our programming and unprecedented networking.

Most of the attendees are INVITATION ONLY, and we strictly limit service provider participation in order to maximize the experience for our Attendees and Sponsors.

Illumina Accelerator, the genomics-based company creation engine focused on building early stage genomics startups welcomes three new companies to its fifth funding cycle. Since its inception in 2014, Illumina Accelerator has helped startups validate and create next-generation sequencing applications and bring those solutions to market. To date, Illumina Accelerator has invested in 13 startups working to advance breakthrough applications in genomics.

After listening to hundreds of startup pitches, and reading even more business plans, most new venture investors develop their own favorite list of “red flags” that signal the beginning of the end of their interest. Others, like Guy Kawasaki, have irreverently called some of these “entrepreneur lies,” but I prefer to think of them as innocent enhancements or omissions that can kill your deal.

At any rate, here is my own list of red flags, from my years of experience advising and investing in aspiring entrepreneurs, which cause me to lose interest and start looking for a way out the door:

In order to address the unmet needs and create opportunities that benefit patients with rare disease in India, a group of volunteers created a not-for-profit organization named Organization for Rare Diseases India (ORDI; www.ordindia.org). ORDI plans to represent the collective voice and advocate the needs of patients with rare diseases and other stakeholders in India. The ORDI team members come from diverse backgrounds such as genetics, molecular diagnostics, drug development, bioinformatics, communications, information technology, patient advocacy and public service. ORDI builds on the lessons learned from numerous similar organizations in the USA, European Union and disease-specific rare disease foundations in India. In this review, we provide a background on the landscape of rare diseases and the organizations that are active in this area globally and in India. We discuss the unique challenges in tackling rare diseases in India, and highlight the unmet needs of the key stakeholders of rare diseases. Finally, we define the vision, mission, goals and objectives of ORDI, identify the key developments in the health care context in India and welcome community feedback and comments on our approach.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has a suggestion for humans who want to stay relevant in a future of artificial intelligence: merge with the machines.

"Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk said at the World Government Summit in Dubai, according to CNBC. "It's mostly about bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output."

Last month, we outlined our top 10 do's and don'ts for getting your Phase I NIH proposal in shape and ready to submit before the April 5 deadline. This month we continue that theme by presenting what we have determined, over years of reviewing proposals, to be our top 10 brilliant ideas or stupid mistakes for Phase II proposals. Here are our favorites: